Violent Non-state Actors and the Syrian Civil War

No-go zones are gray areas in conflict settings where state weakening is followed by the emergence of violent non-state actors (VNSAs). These groups not only expel state security forces from the area but gradually start to take on the functions of the state, such as provision of security, law enforcement, and providing basic goods and services. These no-go zones are coming into the focus of international scholarship, as wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and beyond generate substantially weakened states, which export instability around their immediate neighborhood. This paper focuses on two VNSAs operating in northern Syria, Islamic State (ISIS) and People’s Protection Units (YPG—in Rojava), to assess how they establish, run, and hold no-go zones. In doing so, this paper focuses on their territorial approach, propaganda, economic policy, and redistribution networks. Also, this paper compares and contrasts ISIS and YPG’s diverging views on optimizing taxation and production, along with a discussion of how territory and population size affects these policies.

ISIS’ territorial ambitions and broader effect need a more comprehensive analysis to understand the group’s effects on international relations. However, research on the group is still far less comprehensive when it comes to its level of agency as a VNSA. By using a three-layered framework on autonomy, representation, and influence (ARI), this paper problematizes ISIS’s revolutionary state formation and attempts to evaluate the group’s potential actorness and identify its nuanced territorial understanding and wider impact.

Since the armed confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006, concepts such as “hybrid war,” “hybrid threat,” and “hybrid adversary” have been on the rise. These terms are part of an ongoing debate about the contemporary threat actors who effectively combine conventional and unconventional fighting capabilities, and who possess quasi-state characteristics. The Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, PYD) with its armed wing People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel-YPG), constitutes one of these hybrid nonstate actors. After the Syrian regime withdrew from the Kurdish areas in northern Syria in 2012, the PYD/YPG seized control of several towns and enclaves in this region and emerged as one of the most influential actors of the Syrian civil war. This chapter provides an analysis of the PYD/YPG’s rise in the Syrian context as well as its policy implications with a special emphasis on the concept of “hybrid actor.”

Recent scholarship on civil wars demonstrates the importance of the security dilemma as a motivating force that drives the interaction of rival communities whenever state authority collapses. Less well understood is the ancillary dynamic that students of international relations call a conflict spiral, that is, the marked escalation that occurs as antagonistic actors take steps to protect themselves by implementing increasingly coercive and more violent security-producing programs. Conflict spirals do not always result from security dilemmas, but if they do take shape they raise the stakes of the contest and make conflict management increasingly difficult. Insight into the workings of conflict spirals can be gained from a detailed exploration of the third and fourth phases of the popular uprising that broke out in Syria in the spring of 2011. During these months, radical Islamist forces competed against one another by undertaking more sustained and indiscriminate attacks against minority communities across the northern and northeastern provinces. The attacks strengthened the radical wing of the country’s Kurdish national movement, and sparked the emergence not only of an armed formation affiliated with that faction but also of militias drawn from other minorities. Fighting among these disparate forces entailed a sharp escalation in the severity and extent of the civil war, and complicated the prospects for a negotiated resolution to the conflict.

This chapter analyzes how the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has used water resources as a tool to achieve political and economic objectives and as a weapon of war during the civil war in Syria and the crisis in Iraq. It is argued that, as the region’s strongest violent non-state actor (VNSA), ISIS has deliberately and continuously instrumentalized water resources and water systems, particularly large dams and water supply facilities, in these countries for two main goals: accomplishing the political and economic objectives of its self-proclaimed state by instrumentalizing water as a way to gain political legitimacy and manage it for agricultural production and using water as an offensive and defensive weapon of war. Other belligerent parties have also resorted to the weaponization of water, which has worsened the situation, especially regarding humanitarian conditions.

This chapter analyzes the Obama administration’s “surrogate warfare” in Syria and the pitfalls of its policy of recruiting PYD/YPG to fight against ISIS, the two new international actors of the post-Westphalian Middle East. Surrogate warfare aims to externalize the strategic, operational, and tactical burden of a foreign policy crisis to other states or non-state actors, which are directly affected by this crisis. In fact this is not a strategy uniquely applied to Syria but has long been a US tactic to achieve foreign policy targets through regional proxies including violent non-state actors (VNSAs). As this chapter points out, the Achilles’ heel of this strategy, however, is the potential of losing control over these VNSAs and the damage they might do to relations with traditional regional allies. This is exactly what happened in Obama’s Syria policy, which tried to remote control the crisis with relatively smaller costs and liaised with the VNSAs without considering regional sensitivities. This has been the main reason behind the recent tension with Turkey, which expects a greater US involvement in Syria and considers PYD/YPG to be as dangerous as ISIS due to PYD/YPG’s links with Ankara’s arch enemy PKK. This chapter first makes a comparative analysis of the main characteristics of “surrogate warfare” and then focuses on Syria as a case study, to highlight Washington’s efforts to externalize the burden of the Syrian crisis thereby damaging its relations with neighboring Turkey.

The Syrian civil war has been an arena for violent non-state actors (VNSAs) and external state actors to combat with or through one another. In this battleground, two VNSAs have risen to prominence in their ability to influence regional and global dynamics, namely, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat (PYD)) and its armed wing People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG)) and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). As the patrons of the two main blocs that are currently engaged in the Syrian conflict, the United States and Russia have both colluded with the PYD/YPG to fight against ISIS. While the sides may seem to have the same friend and foe, the rationale and the modality with which they have engaged with the two VNSAs vary significantly. This manuscript provides a comparative account of the engagement of the two main external powers involved in the Syrian civil war, the United States and Russia, with the two outstanding violent non-state actors, PYD/YPG and ISIS. For Washington, combating ISIS quickly overshadowed its other priorities and gradually determined the scope and characteristics of its political and military involvement. The PYD/YPG and its affiliates emerged as the main vessel for the United States to push back against ISIS on the ground. Meanwhile, combating ISIS has been only one of Moscow’s numerous goals in Syria, and ISIS presented a convenient justification for Russia’s military engagement. In this equation, the PYD/YPG’s ability to coexist with the Syrian regime made it a natural partner for Moscow, and the PYD presented Russia with an added tool to influence dynamics in the Syrian civil war. These differences have influenced the extent to which the two countries were influenced by the VNSAs in turn and will come to shape their policies in the near future.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

The protracted Syrian crisis has had drastic worldwide repercussions. For the European Union (EU), the crisis is a multidimensional foreign policy issue with crucial implications given the imminent security challenges posed by violent non-state actors (VNSAs). Wherever the Syrian state has lost control, VNSAs like ISIS and YPG try to expand the territory under their control and sphere of influence, mainly aiming to change regional borders. This causes more suffering for Syrian people in the territorially disintegrated country and threatens both theirs and the EU’s security. This has forced the EU to reconsider its counterterrorism measures, particularly due to the threat of Islamic terrorist attacks in EU capitals. In order to investigate the EU’s actorness vis-à-vis its counterterrorism policy, this chapter analyzes the EU’s effectiveness in responding to rising threats from VNSAs (particularly ISIS). This analysis considers the frameworks the EU uses in dealing with VNSAs, whether it may contribute to building a new order in Syria in cooperation with other major powers and key regional countries, and how these patterns of relations may affect relations with Turkey, a candidate country to the EU and a neighbor of Syria. The chapter argues that the EU’s foreign policy especially regarding its priority of countering terrorism spreading out from the war in Syria demonstrates again that the EU’s actorness is highly contentious while its engagement with the developing world is often described as inconsistent.

This chapter deals with Iran’s increasing relations with the violent non-state actors (VNSAs) in the Middle East in general and during the Syrian civil war in particular. In doing so, it tries to look at the interplay between the isolation imposed by the international order to Iran and its attitude toward VNSAs. To empirically analyze that, this chapter delves into the ISIS and YPG cases with an eye to explaining Iran’s shifting policy preferences stemming from its position in the international order. Furthermore, this chapter also looks at Iran’s engagements with the ISIS and YPG in relation to its engagements with other regional actors, particularly Turkey. This chapter concludes that amidst the proxy relations with various VNSAs in the region, it is the YPG, not ISIS, that would be the key actor in sealing the fate of Syria and Iraq in the future.

This article explores under which conditioning factors and by which diffusion mechanisms have the Syrian civil war has spread to Turkey between 2011 and 2016 via ISIS and the YPG. In the first part of the article, the background of the diffusion of the Syrian civil war will be discussed using four mass-level conditioning factors: structural, political, economic-social, and cultural/perceptional. In the second part, the conflict’s direct diffusion mechanisms with the help of the analytical tools of bad neighborhood(s), interaction opportunities and ties and conflict characteristics, and indirect diffusion mechanisms such as new tactics or strategies, new ideas and delegitimization of previous approaches, revised expectations about the likely behavior of key outside actors, and revised expectations about the chances of success will be used to investigate their various effects on Turkey via ISIS and YPG.